The torch is passed, one way or the other.
On the day that one champion retired and another champion could not quite repeat, a new champion won the first marathon he ever ran.
At the same time, a future marathon contender was courted with a front-row seat for his first New York City Marathon.
It is a wonderful seat, the back of a support truck, watching the elite women and men leave Staten Island, then chugging through the other boroughs, slightly ahead of the great male runners, hearing the cheers.
This kind of experience would give ideas to a premium athlete like Chris Solinsky, 25, who set an American record for 10,000 meters last spring. Solinsky has never run a marathon, but he surely will after participating vicariously in Sunday’s race. I happened to be seated next to him in the support truck and saw the marathon through his eyes as they took in the event, and the city.
It is simply the best sporting day of the year in New York. This special Sunday in midfall is when elite runners and admirable plodders and even a Chilean miner come to finish 26 miles 385 yards.
Solinsky was being set up.
“Are you kidding? He’s our future,” said Mary Wittenberg, the race director, who made sure that Solinsky, a large and powerful runner from the University of Wisconsin, had a good view. Wittenberg has invited several potential stars in recent years, including Dathan Ritzenhein, who finished eighth Sunday.
In the breezy chill, Solinsky squeezed his 6-foot-1, 165-pound frame — he’s a former soccer player, large for a distance runner — into the middle of the back seat of the open truck parked on the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge. We watched the elite women, in their cutoff outfits, shiver in place for 10 or more minutes before they were liberated to run. He marveled at the waves of runners who surged in orderly fashion toward the start.
As we came off the bridge into Brooklyn, hearing the bands and the spectators, Solinsky posted updates on Twitter while gazing at the lead pack of 20 runners, moving in unison like 20 very fit molecules.
“They are feeling each other out,” he said knowingly.
In that pack were Meb Keflezighi, the American who won last year, and Haile Gebrselassie, a world-record holder, and so many other runners, many from Africa. Solinsky had trained with two others — Tim Nelson, an American, and Simon Bairu, a Canadian — and knew their strategy was to stay in the first wave, not become giddy and break away, not fall behind.
The crowds in Brooklyn were amazing. Wittenberg later noted that Fourth Avenue in Bay Ridge was catching up with First Avenue in Manhattan for crowd support, high praise indeed. One fan in the crowd shouted, “Solinsky!” I asked, “Do you know him?” and he modestly said no. Setting an American record has made Solinsky recognizable, even huddled in the back of a support truck.
We climbed the Queensboro Bridge and turned into the screaming wall of humanity on First Avenue. Somebody held the best placard of the day, “When I Grow Up I Want to Be You,” about nobody in particular, as far as I could tell, but about 45,000 runners.
The crowds seemed better uptown and in the Bronx than in past years. As we turned back into Manhattan and down onto Fifth Avenue, Solinsky watched Gebre Gebremariam of Ethiopia and Emmanuel Mutai of Kenya take a big lead, side by side. In Central Park, a woman in the crowd shouted, “Chris!” Solinsky did not recognize her, either, but he was getting the feel of hearing his name in New York City.
Solinsky said he liked the stride of Gebremariam, the bigger runner, but did not discount Mutai, whom he had seen run once, getting sick to his stomach late in a race. “But maybe that’s the way he runs,” Solinsky added.
In the park, Mutai seemed to diminish, fly away like the booster stage of a rocket, as Gebremariam tossed away his gray ski cap and opened up, his stride even more fluid than it was an hour earlier. A motorcycle cop passed us, saying, “Race over.”
And sure enough it was, as Gebremariam won his first marathon, in 2 hours 8 minutes 14 seconds, a full 64 seconds ahead of Mutai. Later, we found out that Gebrselassie had dropped out with a knee injury and announced his retirement and that Keflezighi had finished sixth. (Nelson finished 13th; Bairu dropped out.)
“If it was easy, it would get done a lot easier or a lot sooner, but that’s the marathon,” said Keflezighi, directing praise at all runners, and calling Gebrselassie a role model. When a man born in Eritrea speaks in glowing terms of a man from Ethiopia, this speaks to the sportsmanship of running. That camaraderie prompted Howie Evans, the longtime sports editor of The Amsterdam News, to ask Keflezighi about it.
“Distance running is something that you share,” Keflezighi said. “Usually you run a 100 meter, ‘Get out of my lane.’ This is the distance. Or intimidate — if you’re going to play football, things like that — you have to intimidate your opponent. But here, it’s a long way. Let’s help each other out and get the best of ourselves.”
That was the ethos of the marathon. I could tell Solinsky was getting into it, as we leapt off the support truck.
“You’re hooked,” I said.
“Maybe in three years,” he replied.
Mary Wittenberg’s master plan was working.
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